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Super Bowl a chance for NFL to showcase its immense power: Arthur

PHOENIX—When this week began, the questions being asked were not in the official Super Bowl program. Usually you come in with the storylines clearly mapped out, paths between the trees. The quarterbacks, the defences, the coaches, the stars, the show. This year? Yeah, not so much.

Sure, there was the question of whether Marshawn Lynch pay another $20,000 (U.S) or more to grab his crotch during the game, which is theoretically his right as an American. It was also the contractually bargained right of the NFL to threaten to fine him, and still sell a 20-by-24-inch picture of said crotch grab on its website for $150, until it pulled the pictures Sunday night or Monday morning.

But before all the talk and the non-talk, before the whole enchilada, the week of the Super Bowl dawned full of different roads. Did the New England Patriots cheat? Did they illegally take the air out of the football? If they did, could anybody prove it? Were Tom Brady’s feelings hurt? (Briefly.) Was Tom Brady still, as some reporters had asked, an American hero? (Maybe.) Would Matt Damon still be young enough to play him in the movie? (Undetermined.)

It spun and spun. Did the NFL let the Patriots play half a playoff game — a game that as it happened was not a blowout at halftime, but could have been — just in order to catch them in the act, as reported by ace FOX NFL insider Jay Glazer, and repeated by respected ESPN reporter Ed Werder? (It was reported they did not.) Was there a mystery ballboy? (Apparently he went to the bathroom?)

The NFL cruised into this Super Bowl week in style, dwarfed by its own immensity. Deflategate was on CNN, sure, but CNN will chase go live to anything. But the issue led the CBS Evening News, too, because scandal always adds rocket fuel to any fire, and the NFL is the biggest bonfire going.

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So, it cast off sparks. Richard Sherman, Seattle’s fearless Stanford cornerback kicked off the week by saying “Will they be punished? Probably not. Not as long as (Patriots owner) Robert Kraft and Roger Goodell are still taking pictures at their respective homes. (Goodell) was just at Kraft’s house last week before the AFC championship. Talk about conflict of interest. As long as that happens, it won’t affect them at all.” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, informed of this, said, “He said them out loud?”

He did, which meant that the normally staid Kraft came out firing, and round and round we go. It’s all part of the circus, because in the NFL, you can’t silence everyone. After the Pro Bowl came and went, Miko Grimes, the wife of Miami Dolphins cornerback Brent Grimes, unleashed a hyperpowered rant, tweet by tweet, that called the NFL greedy and anti-woman, cited friends of hers who were domestically abused by NFL players and noted the one-game suspensions that followed, alluded to the league violating concussion protocols, and generally threatened to spill everything she knew, if she could. Frankly, she made some pretty good points.

The NFL is a control freak of a league when it comes to rules on the field, and when it comes to how it is portrayed by its broadcast partners. In Gabriel Sherman’s GQ story on Goodell’s horrible year he details how the commissioner pressured HBO not to make one of the league’s concussion-denying doctors, Ira Casson, look bad by running his answers on what concussions do to a brain. That’s this league, all right. The Super Bowl isn’t designed to answer those questions, either.

When you’re at a Super Bowl it feels like an American Rome — martial music blaring from the headquarters at the convention centre, which is covered in NFL banners; the crowds that flock not only to the fan festival, but to watch the chaos of Media Day unfold, from the stands. They build it every year, and every year people come. For the record, the Patriots defused the deflation issue so successfully that Media Day was just like every other Media Day, except this time there was a big chubby guy wearing a barrel.

But the empire is so sprawling that barbarians can spring from anywhere. For goodness sakes, this month Mike Ditka said he probably wouldn’t let his kids play football, if they were young today. It’s like Kansas City Chiefs offensive lineman and NFL Players’ Association president Eric Winston told the Washington Post this week: “It’s not only the league office. It’s the owners. When are they going to step in and do something to make sure things are handled in the right way? It’s easy to look at the bottom line and say everything is fine. But you never see the iceberg until you hit it, right?”

There’s ice out there, but the good ship NFL keeps steaming forward, faster and bigger, crushing everything in its path. So far.

I didn’t attend the Super Bowl last year: I was in Sochi, Russia. The Olympics were days away, another global television show, and after a series of delays in Toronto and Frankfurt and Moscow, after a final flight on Air Siberia we arrived in the middle of the night to what felt like a near-deserted fields of mostly finished identical apartment buildings, behind a wire fence and checkpoints manned by Russian soldiers. You couldn’t tell which building was which; it took some time to find the right one. It felt a very long way from home.

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After sorting out the bureaucracy and dropping our bags in our rooms, my friend Sean Fitz-Gerald and I walked out into the desolate darkness at 3:30 a.m. to an all-night media village bar, which was in a tent, surrounded by the faceless buildings. The place was empty except for a young lady behind the bar, and a manager who was watching “Gladiator” in Russian on a laptop. We ordered beers and cold sausage.

And the Super Bowl was on TV, in Russian. There were four Russians in the booth and one reporting from the sidelines, and not every commercial break had an ad, so the Russians would just chatter away for three minutes. Some Americans photographers piled into the bar, and they cheered for one side or the other, and Seattle turned Denver into rubble and dust. The announcers seemed enthusiastic. Halfway around the world, it all felt very familiar.

The Super Bowl is not designed to answer questions, or at least, not designed to answer the wrong questions for the NFL. It is designed to showcase the league’s immense power, its staggering popularity, its primacy in North American sports. It is designed to be American Pravda. It is the NFL beating its chest, honouring the troops, ordering the flyover, broadcasting the message that resonates in places all over the world: Here we are, and we are magnificent. It is raw power.

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